


Sealskin

by TheLionInMyBed



Series: Raised By Wolves [12]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Elves, Selkies, assassinations as a substitute for therapy, not a very good substitute, what are coping mechanisms we just don't know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:27:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29449269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: A forced marriage. A stolen skin. When a selkie commissions Khazri to rescue her kidnapped daughter, he tries not to make it personal.He fails, of course.
Series: Raised By Wolves [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/393619
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22





	Sealskin

The waves lapped the shore like an insistent tongue. It was high summer but a cold wind came in off the sea, tugging at Khazri’s cloak, sliding chill fingers through the gaps in his clothes. 

Beryl nosed between the pebbles, snapping at tiny crabs and minnows stranded in rockpools. Every so often one of the larger boulders laid out on the sand would shudder awake and raise its head to blink sleepy black eyes at her. 

With her brother beside her, she would have tackled a seal in a heartbeat, but it was just her now, and she’d always been the more cautious of the two. When a large bull grunted a warning, she snarled and danced away, back to Khazri’s side. The seal barked at them again and Khazri skirted it carefully. They could hunt later when they’d found who they were looking for, and he was sure he wouldn’t be killing a potential employer. 

The gull had told him which outcropping she liked best, and he scrambled over rocks white with the skeletons of barnacles to the selkie’s perch. 

Up close, she was massive, easily three times Khazri’s weight. Her hair hung around her, the same slick black as the seaweed that garlanded the rock she was sunbathing on. Her eyes were closed but as he approached, shells crunching beneath his boots, she yawned wide and long. It was unsettling to see teeth as long and sharp as Beryl’s in a woman’s mouth. 

Beside her lay the carcass of a massive salmon. Roe gleamed like garnets set upon a filigree of fish bones cushioned in satin flesh, and Beryl’s nose twitched with interest. Khazri laid an arresting hand on her flank. 

“The gull said you wanted to talk,” he said.

The selkie opened her eyes. They were liquid black, lightless as the depths. “Yes. Come. Sit. Eat.  _ Talk _ .”

Beryl didn’t need any encouragement. Paws clattered on the rocks as she closed the distance between them. The selkie lowered her head to touch noses with the wolf, and then Beryl turned her attention to the salmon.

As the wolf ravaged the carcass, Khazri dropped to a crouch in the lee of an outcropping, just out of the selkie’s reach. The rock was sun-warm, a welcome break from the wind’s sharp bite.

“My third daughter was born late in the season,” the selkie said. Her voice was harsh as a seal’s bark, not suited to storytelling, but impossible to ignore. “As the storms were coming in. She was small and slow, but she was my daughter still. Anemone, my youngest and best loved. But one day, as she lay upon the sands, a human man crept up to her. He distracted her with pretty words and shiny trinkets and then he took her skin and took her with it. Now my daughter languishes far from the sea. Her heritage is the water and the ice, black depths and sunny shallows. The coil of muscle and the drag of the undertow. Hers is the flash of silver scales, the crunch of bone beneath sharp teeth. The hunt and the storm and salt blood spilt in saltwater.” She snapped at the air. “She will have all that again. She will be  _ free _ .” 

As she finished, the selkie drew herself up to her full, towering height. She was very beautiful in the way of all predators, sharp and graceful, deadly purpose clothed in flesh. She reminded him of Beryl and of Valdemar. She reminded him of some of the things Imrael would say when Khazri was atop him. Danger had never stirred Khazri like that and he wondered what had first drawn a human to her daughter. What had sent him out onto the sands to woo a selkie with kelp tangled in her hair and scales between her teeth? 

Growing up, his uncle had told him and his cousins stories about the dangers of human women, hungry for fae-blooded children, or the simple pleasure of mastering something greater than themselves. Why should men be any better? In the bright sunshine, Khazri shivered. “Why do you need me?” 

“She will not come down to the water. She will not talk to me. It hurts her to see what she has lost. You must set her free. Send her back to me.”

“So. A favour for a favour?” This he’d do for nothing, but an exchange was traditional. It might come in handy the next time he almost drowned himself. 

The selkie barked a laugh and slapped the rock beside her with one webbed hand. “No favours, faerie boy. Bring my daughter back to me and I’ll pay you in pearls. Bring me her husband’s head to crunch between my teeth, and I’ll bring you gold snatched from the cracked hulls of sunken ships.” 

“Alright,” said Khazri. “Beryl?” 

The wolf’s head snapped up. Licking blood and silver scales from her muzzle, she sniffed at the sealskin that lay draped around the selkie’s waist. It might not be enough to find the daughter’s with, but it was a place to start. 

He stood up - the wind coiled close around him sliding its fingers through his hair - and hopped down from the rock. 

* * *

Khazri tried not to take things personally. He almost always failed, and so it was now as he stalked Auldbrook’s tidy streets, on the trail of the selkie’s daughter. It was a prosperous town - the fishing in the bay was good enough to easily sustain a small fleet of fisherfolk and a bay full of seals and selkies besides. The streets were cobbled and its neat-shingled houses painted prettily in white and deepest blue. Mostly humans, but Khazri passed an elven woman hurrying towards the docks, a tattooed kraken wrapping writhing tentacles around her bare bicep. He pulled his hood down lower but she did not spare him a second glance. 

The selkie hadn’t told him where to find her daughter, but though the beach was thick with the scent of selkie not yet taken by the tide, there was only one trail to follow in the town proper. Beryl led him past the neat little inn where Imrael had taken a room to a shop proclaimed to be a baker’s by the sheaf of wheat on its sign and the heady smell of fresh bread bursting from the door.

Loitering with his hood up, hoping whatever dregs of magic he possessed covered how incredibly suspicious this was, Khazri peered inside to see the baker hard at work behind the counter. He was a thin man with a patchy brown beard, quite young despite the grey flecking his hair. He didn’t look like the kind of monster that would steal a person, but you couldn’t always tell by looking.

Khazri had known what his wife was from her very first smile.

The shop did a good trade; Khazri watched some thirty people come and go over the course of an hour, but his attention was on the man. It would have been nice if there’d been a place within the shop where his eyes lingered for too long - a crock, a floorboard, a loose brick within the fireplace - but Khazri had no such luck. 

Things were entirely unremarkable until a woman stepped in from the back room carrying a tray. She slipped behind the counter and kissed the man upon the lips before turning to serve a young goblin woman. 

It was obvious what  _ she _ was. The selkie wasn’t as vast as her mother, but there was no mistaking the resemblance. She was round and sleek, black hair cropped into a silky cap, black eyes quick and bright. She smiled a great deal as she served the customer, but she was careful to keep her lips folded over her teeth.

Khazri took a breath and stepped into the shop. The goblin girl carefully skirted him on her way out the door with a loaf clutched between her claws. 

“Can I help you?” the selkie said. Her eyes widened as she looked him over, but only with curiosity. 

“What’s good?”

“Everything! But I’m biased.” The shelves behind her were stacked with a dragon’s hoard of tarts jewelled with fruit and golden loaves. Some had been fashioned into shapes - beasts, baskets, sheaves of wheat, and shoals of fish, their scales glazed bright. 

“Three of the almond ones,” Khazri said. 

They were as good as the selkie had promised, sweet and crisp with the lingering taste of bitter almonds that reminded him of his grandmother’s dinner parties. Beryl snapped up hers and then, to give her a chance to sniff around the shop, Khazri lingered at the counter, nibbling at his pastry. The baker darted around her kitchen, skirting reefs of loaves, dipping into the oven and swooping out with steaming trays. 

“Are you in town long?” she asked him, snatching up a loaf and wrapping it in a twist of flax paper for a woman with a blacksmith’s soot-stained hands. 

“Not long.”

“Give me a little more than that! A proper story and I’ll give you another pastry. On the house.” 

There was a reason she was asking  _ him _ for a story and not the blacksmith, and it wasn’t just because the woman had to be her neighbour. Making himself inconspicuous came naturally, but once he’d attracted someone’s attention Khazri didn’t have the skill to throw up a glamour that would hide that he had pointed ears and skin the colour of dirty ice. Let both of them pretend it was only because he was new in town. “That can’t be good business.”

“Oh, my husband despairs of me- “ she glanced around theatrically to check they were alone. “- But I still want the story.”

“A story for a story.”

“I don’t see what story a humble baker could trade for yours, but as you wish.” The selkie grinned and this time her teeth were on full display, as sharp as her mother’s. 

“I’m travelling to Sanovarr. We’re just stopping here for the night.” They’d been camping since the Spur and Imrael’s tolerance for it was limited. 

The selkie wrinkled her nose. “Well, now I’m glad I didn’t trade you a pastry. That’s hardly a story at all. At least tell me where you got your dog. He looks half wolf.” But her eyes weren’t on Beryl, whose shoulder was pressed to Khazri’s hip. She was looking at the grey-brown fur wrapped around his shoulders. 

“She,” he corrected, pretending he hadn’t noticed. “We grew up together.”

“Aww. Can I feed her?” 

“Yes.”

The selkie leaned over the counter, dangling a crust and Beryl reared up onto her hind legs and put her paws on the counter to take it gently from her fingers. The wolf sniffed at the selkie with the same interest she’d shown her mother and the selkie sniffed back. She was very human-seeming - probably more so than Khazri - and it was strange to see it fall away, even for a moment. The husband, behind her, said nothing, but a spasm of some emotion passed across his face, too swift for Khazri to interpret. 

“What a good girl,” said the selkie and held out a broad-palmed hand. “I’m Anemone.”

“Valerian,” Khazri lied, taking it. Safer, now, than cannibalising past acquaintances. The elves of the Summer Court were often named for plants and flowers, and he didn’t think anyone in Auldbrook was likely to realise that wasn’t what he was. 

“Like the plant? Me too!” she said, delighted. “Well, actually like the blobby thing you find in rock pools, but the flower is prettier so I pretend it’s that.”

“It suits you,” he told her truthfully.

“I suppose I promised you my story. My parents both catch fish, but I can’t stand the wet. Or the cold. Or the fish, actually. I hate the smell.” She shuddered, a great full body movement like she was shaking her coat dry. “But I married a local boy and settled down not two miles from where I was born, so I still wake up with the sea in my nose.” 

“It must be nice to have family so close,” Khazri ventured. 

“It depends on the family,” she said brightly, which Khazri couldn’t argue with. 

There were cages and there were cages and there was little good in rattling the bars. Far better to find a key. 

If the husband had any sense, he wouldn’t have tucked the skin away in the attic where his wife might find it looking for dusters. Khazri could stalk them for a year and the man might never show him where the skin was hidden. 

No, if there was truth to be found, it would be upon the edge of a knife. 

* * *

Each shop in the row had a yard behind it, sheltered from the worst of the sea winds, where the milliner kept chickens and the tinker grew regimented rows of carrots. Behind the bakery, there were flowers; aster, thrift and sea lavender. The fragrance clung to Khazri’s cloak as he brushed through them. 

The rain barrel set beneath the roof made it easy enough for him to drag himself up onto the second floor’s window sill, and it was even easier to work a knife between the shutters and lift the latch. Crime clearly wasn’t much of a problem in Auldbrook.

An ear pressed to the wood told him the room was empty. “Keep watch,” he whispered to Beryl, and eased the shutters open. 

The sitting room was as neat as the shop downstairs. Wooden chairs set around a table, cushions embroidered with wildflowers, embroidered with more enthusiasm than botanical accuracy. A bouquet of real flowers stood upon the table in a pink clay vase, the same that grew in the garden down below. 

Stepping carefully along the edges of the room so that the floorboards did not creak, Khazri poked through the kitchen cupboards. The righteous fury that’d driven him to breaking and entering was fading a little under the grimy feeling of poking through another person’s things, sifting through spare blankets and chipped crockery. 

Well, Khazri thought, narrowly preventing an avalanche of mugs and easing the door closed, it wouldn’t be anywhere  _ obvious _ .

Checking under the floorboards he found two buttons, four, fishbones, a needle, a penny and a lockbox with, he guessed, their savings inside. Too small to hold a sealskin, and he put it back where it was. 

The smell of warm bread didn’t entirely mask the scent of what he guessed was the baker’s hair oil, and the faint smell of seaweed and wet fur that had to be the selkie. He followed it through into the bedroom. 

The baker was asleep upon his bed, one arm stretched out into the space where, were his wife here, she would have slept. The unconscious possessiveness of that gesture fanned the banked flames of his anger, and he stepped forward, one hand reaching out to wake the man, the other dropping to the knife belted at his hip. 

His fingers brushed warm silk and he hesitated. There was a fur spread out over the blankets, a silver-grey sealskin, flecked with black. 

Skin could come from any seal, but this one had a lustre to it, a suppleness that said it was more than the remains of some dead thing. It seemed almost to breathe of its own accord, never mind the sleeping body beneath it. 

So maybe it  _ was _ somewhere obvious. 

The man’s shoulder twitched beneath Khazri’s hand and he snatched it back. Arteru was kind; the man mumbled into his pillow and subsided, breaths deepening. 

Still, Khazri stood frozen, one hand to his chest, the fingers of the other still brushing the hilt of a blade. 

What was he  _ doing _ ?

In all the years he’d made his living meddling in things that didn’t concern him, a mumbling go-between for fae and humans, had he ever acted this rashly? Imrael would certainly say he had, but this was the first time Khazri had ever been so eager to find a villain, to force violence when there was no need for it. To kill a man for no reason at all. Anemone had told him all he needed to know, but he hadn’t wanted to listen. 

Feeling cold, feeling nauseous, Khazri backed out of the room, wincing at the faint scuff of his boots, the quietest groan of the boards. He had not been so afraid on the way in, had been half hoping the man would wake and force a confrontation.

He dropped from the window and, instead of getting up and out of sight, huddled against the rain barrel. It was slightly damp and he could feel the chill leaching through his cloak, but he pulled his hood lower over his face and stayed where he was. Beryl sniffed at him and then her jaws closed gently around his wrist, fangs pricking his skin. 

It wasn’t like her and Khazri stayed on his knees to bump noses and scratch at the thick mane of fur about her neck. What had happened to Jeff had been even worse for her. It was losing a brother and losing a limb both at once.

He still wore the cloak his wife had made him, out of the dead wolf’s fur. It smelled of cedar and not like a living thing at all. Nothing like the living sealskin that covered Anemone’s bed. Khazri pulled Jeff’s skin tighter around him, wishing he could do more than wear it. Wishing he could become the wolf. Their hungers were simpler and so were their pains. The hunt had eaten Moire; let it eat him too. 

Footsteps in the alley and he looked up to see Anemone with her hand upon the garden gate. Anemone the selkie’s child, Anemone the baker’s wife. It was clear now which one she’d chosen. 

“Hello? Are you- Oh!” she said as Khazri looked up. “You’re the boy from this morning. Valerian? What’re you doing here? Are you hurt?”

“Your mother sent me,” he blurted. 

The concern was gone from her face as though it had never been. She could not transform without her skin, but her expression changed, the shadows shifting to suggest a muzzle, sharp teeth barely hidden by her lips. “Oh? Why?”

“She said he stole your skin.”

Anemone barked a laugh. “Just my heart, but that doesn’t make for a good story. Not the kind of story  _ she _ likes. Not enough blood. What on earth did she think - ?” She blinked, a nictitating membrane turning her eyes milky. “She sent you to steal it back.”

“Yes.”

“And to kill him?”

“Yes.”

“What did she offer you?”

Khazri surprised himself by laughing, an awful sound even to his own ears. “Gold. Pearls. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t for money. I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence in which Anemone studied his face. He thought she might attack him - he thought he might be glad of it - but the expression on her face was sad. Finally, she stepped past him to the door. “I’m going to put the kettle on,” she said, leaving it open behind her. 

* * *

The selkie’s cups were heavy earthenware, glazed green with the impression of leaves baked into the clay. There was a chip in the rim of Khazri’s, and he pressed his tongue to the gap. At his feet, Beryl lay with her long legs stretched out towards the big bread ovens, which still held a ghost of the day’s heat.

“Here,” Anemone said, setting a plate of biscuits down on the table. The edges were singed black and she picked one up and broke it in half with a sharp crack and a shrug. “I can’t sell them so we may as well. Now, in my experience, people who steal and kill for money don’t usually change their minds because the job’s easier than they thought it would be.”

For politeness’ sake, Khazri took a biscuit - the smallest - and put it down beside the cup. And then a second to pass down to Beryl. “She said you needed help. You don’t. So. I left.”

“So you did.” Dark, guileless eyes blinked at him from above the rim of her cup. “You seem like a nice boy.”

“You seem like a poor judge of character.” The tea could be poisoned. If Khazri had been in her position, it would have been. He sipped it anyway. 

Anemone crunched her biscuit with obvious pleasure. “My husband says I’m too good-natured. And that was  _ after  _ he saw what I did to the first person Mama sent to drown him.” 

Guileless was the wrong word, Khazri decided. Kindness wasn’t naivety; it was a choice and not always an easy one. “How many times has she done this?”

“Enough that I’m thoroughly sick of it. First she’d send my sisters to beg me to leave him. When that didn’t work, she started sending thieves, and then killers. You’re the second of those. If she’d just had the woman knife him in the alley, he’d be dead, but Mama has a flair for the dramatic. She wanted him drowned. And all because she loves me.” 

“She loves the idea of you.” Valdemar hadn’t claimed to love him, but it didn’t feel too different. His wife had been pleased to own him, as she had been pleased to own her horses, hawks and hounds. Charmed by his wildness, and quick to correct him when he turned it on her, as you would a dog that snarled out of turn. The kind of woman his mother would have chosen for him if she hadn’t chosen the goddess instead.

Slowly, Anemone nodded. “It felt like my husband was the first person that ever saw me. He used to eat his lunch down on the shore, throw the scraps to the gulls and the little crabs in the rockpools. I’d pretend I was sunbathing but really I was watching him. One day we got talking, and eventually he started bringing lunch for me too. I don’t suppose you remember the first time you ever ate bread? I do. It was soft and pillowy and I fell in love.” She sighed. “With bread first, but him eventually. Have you ever been in love? Ever let someone really, truly know you?” She paused, waiting for him to answer. When he didn’t, she said, “It’s a terrifying feeling, like peeling off your skin - I’d know! - but it’s worth it.”

The wolf skin was coarse beneath Khazri’s fingers, snagging at the calluses left by his bow. Khazri had loved the wolves and loved Beryl still. There hadn’t been anything frightening in it that he remembered, but he’d spent that summer mad with terror. He’d felt an echo of it when he told Imrael the truth about the temple. He pulled his hand away and wrapped it around the cup. 

Anemone took another biscuit and then gestured at the plate encouragingly. “Sometimes it helps to talk. Or so I hear, for it’s never been a problem for me. Mother used to tell me to be quiet because I was scaring off the fish. This is the part where  _ you  _ talk.”

If she hadn’t guessed some of what was wrong with him, Khazri was fairly sure she would have killed him. Or tried to, anyway. “I was married,” he said. “Now I’m not.” 

“Congratulations,” Anemone said and toasted him with a biscuit. “That’s still not enough of a story for a reward, though.”

“I’ll live.”

“Although…” Anemone leapt to her feet and pulled a loaf from one of the shelves. She wrapped it up and handed it to Khazri. “Will you give this to her for me? To set her mind at ease? It won’t work but-” Sharp teeth worried at her lower lip. “She’s my mother.”

* * *

For all that he’d wanted blood that morning, Khazri was reluctant to face the selkie now. 

Her rock was bare of all but fishbones and he dared to hope he could leave Anemone’s package for her and hurry away. But as he approached, the waves grew higher, chomping at the rock, sucking at his boots and Beryl’s paws. The selkie stepped out of them naked, dragging her skin behind her, her hair the same slick black as the wave-licked sea. 

“Is it done?” she asked hungrily. “Did you kill him?”

“I have a gift,” Khazri said in lieu of an answer, reaching into his cloak for Anemone’s package. He pulled back the wrapping to show her the gift; the loaf had been baked into the shape of salmon as long as his arm, tail lashing, each scale cleanly picked out. The moonlight silvered it so that it almost looked real. “From your daughter.”

“I don’t want gifts.” The selkie bared her teeth. “I want  _ her _ . Give her back.” Said with a predator’s certainty. Khazri had spent too long with a wolf’s mind rubbing up against his own not to understand it, or to know how appealing it could be to let the hunt subsume all else. 

At his side, Beryl bared fangs of her own. More cautious than her brother, but that didn’t mean she was not brave. It would be very easy to give the command, to cast a new villain, to fight and win. It would be very easy to kill and take only pleasure from it. Only the same relief he’d felt when Valdemar went still, hands slackening from about his throat. 

But Khazri wasn’t a wolf. “She’s not coming back,” he said. “She’s happy.” 

“She has learned to love a cage. She should be free.” 

Something about Anemone reminded him of Gilavar, his cousin, dead almost a decade. They’d both known they wanted more from life than they were offered, but Anemone hadn’t been too twisted up by bitterness to reach for it. 

While his cousin was far past his help, it was nice to see that sometimes people did get out. “She is,” Khazri said and held out the bag again. “It’s not blood in the sea but. It’s good. You should try it.”

When the selkie made no move to take the package, Khazri set it down on a dry jut of rock and stepped back. 

Even though he saw well in the dark, the stones were slick and navigating them took all his attention. It wasn’t until he stood upon the sand that he looked back. 

The rock was bare. The selkie and the gift were gone. 

* * *

The room they’d taken was at the top of the inn, and Khazri followed Beryl up the stairs to the attic. 

He hadn’t expected Imrael to be awake but he was, looking out through the little dormer window to the invisible point where darkened sky met sea. There was no light in the room, but a small, wavering flame danced in his cupped palms, like the fire he conjured to light his cigarettes but brighter and far hotter. 

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be back tonight,” Imrael said and yawned hugely. The flame winked out. 

“I went to the bakery.”

“In the middle of the night?” 

“They had pastries.” Khazri sat down on the bed and Berly leapt up beside him.

“You went out to buy sweets?”

“I went out to kill the baker. I bought sweets instead.” It was a relief to say it like that. To make it sound ridiculous and not deranged. 

Imrael rolled his eyes and tugged Khazri towards him by his belt so he could rummage through his pockets. “Of course you did,” he said, holding up the pastry triumphantly. “Start at the beginning.”

The room was warm and Khazri unfastened the fur from around his neck and spread it out across the bed. “A seagull said a selkie wanted to hire me - ”


End file.
